An
authoritarian regime may be unpopular, even loathed, but at
least it has rules. The rules may bear little resemblance to
the law, but relations between state officials and society come
to have a predictable rhythm. People understand where the red
lines are, and they can choose to stay within them or to step
across. Egypt does not work this way under the field marshal
who became president, ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi.
Nearly
three years since the military coup that brought Sisi to power,
not only are the red lines blurred, but the unconsolidated regime
itself is so fuzzily defined that Egyptians doubt it is one
coherent entity. The security forces seem to have slipped the
leash of the executive branch. As one journalist told me in
Cairo, “You never know which security branch it is any
more. The only thing that’s clear is that Sisi does not
control them. It’s unpredictable and unsettled. That’s
what makes everything dangerous. You can’t see it coming.”
The
period since the July 2013 coup has been the single most repressive
in modern Egyptian history. Whether one is counting dead bodies,
imprisoned or tortured activists, or violations of academic
freedom, the toll is staggering for uncounted families. In 2015,
according to the El-Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of
Victims of Violence, the documented cases of forcible disappearance
at the hands of the state numbered 464. Almost 500 people died
in custody while 676 more were tortured. To date, the new year
has been terrible as well: In February, the El-Nadeem Center
reports, another eight Egyptians died in detention and at least
another 80 were tortured.
The
2011 uprising that toppled President Husni Mubarak brought countless
Egyptians to political activism. Hundreds of these people, and
colleagues who were also active before the uprising, now languish
in prison. Others want to leave the country or wish they could.
Several have been barred from leaving, even for short trips
abroad. This restriction is also haphazard—the dark joke
making the rounds is that you have to be at the Cairo airport’s
passport control to know if you can travel. Still others cope
by dropping their political lives in favour of completely unrelated
careers. Few take these measures out of fear. It is just too
painful to contemplate what has happened. Some are so depressed
they avoid friends and stay home. There are also stories of
organizers who are so angry about the course of events that
they refuse to practice their craft. As one activist worried,
“We are not going to be ready next time. Everyone is paralyzed.”
Yet
all the pronouncements that the transition away from authoritarianism
failed, all the clichés about spring turning to winter,
also miss the mark. The overall level of dissent is much higher
than in the penultimate days of Mubarak before the uprising.
On average there have been five times more collective labour
actions and other protests per day under Sisi than in the period
2008-2010. The country is in dire straits.
The
2011 uprising did not create the mess—the decisions of
powerful actors did. Pining for the status quo ante, the elites
failed to meet the most basic popular demands; now they are
trying to contain the lingering tensions while building a new
regime amidst intense competition among old regime figures and
newer entrants. These struggles, in addition to the structural
fiscal weakness of the state and the poor economy, generate
fears of a polity coming undone and explain the viciousness
of the backlash.
Is
it a house of cards? Many Egyptian observers say that no amount
of aid from the Gulf, US diplomatic cover and police brutality
can keep the state running. More than one person openly told
me that Sisi might be overthrown, despite the huge investments
and grand spectacles that went into putting him on the wobbling
throne, and despite his attempts to place his sons high up in
intelligence agencies. It is a bold prognostication. Yet one
need only read the newspapers and be in Cairo to see the outlines
of such a narrative.
JUST
AN AVERAGE WEEK
Even
a cursory visit to Cairo unmasks the fiction that it is Sisi’s
Egypt. The posters, chocolates and women’s underwear bearing
his visage that popped up in the immediate wake of the coup
are all gone. The stray, tattered Sisi sign on the city walls
looks like someone forgot to take it down.
On
February 24, Sisi delivered the longest speech of his presidency,
in his usual colloquial Arabic, and directed at detractors of
the post-coup order. He warned, “Please, don’t listen
to anyone but me. I am dead serious. Be careful. No one should
try my patience or exploit my good manners in attempts to tear
down the state. I swear to God that anyone who comes near the
state, I will remove from the face of the earth. I am telling
you this as the whole of Egypt is listening. What do you think
you are doing? Who are you?”
The
jokes started before the speech ended. Egyptian and foreign
journalists debated whether Sisi is “baby Saddam”
or “baby Qaddafi” before someone chimed in that
Sisi can only wish he had the authority of either doomed dictator.
During an address about his vision for 2030, the president said
he would sell himself, if he could, for the good of the country.
Less than two hours later, an Egyptian in the United States
listed Sisi for sale on eBay. One former protester told me,
“Don’t call it a regime because it’s not.
This country is a joke, a parody, a satire. We don’t have
to be in opposition. We just need to sit and wait.”
The
jocularity coexists with palpable anger. On February 18, the
week before Sisi’s speech, a policeman got into the cab
of Muhammad Sayyid, 24, and asked the driver to transport some
furniture in the Cairene district of Darb al-Ahmar. An argument
broke out between the cop and the cabbie, known in the neighbourhood
as Darbaka, over the agreed-upon fare, at the end of which the
policeman killed Darbaka with a shot to the head. The response
of residents was to beat the cop senseless. At first, the government
said, “The bullet mistakenly came out of the gun.”
The following day, over a thousand protested outside the Interior
Ministry. When protesters invoke the name of the driver in Darb
al-Ahmar, they also mention ‘Afifi Husni of Isma‘iliyya
and Tal‘at Shabib of Luxor, two others tortured and murdered
by police over the winter. Their killings also sparked protests.
Sisi and the interior minister, Magdi ‘Abd al-Ghaffar,
scrambled to quiet the furor, placing the blame on a few bad
apples in police ranks. In response, seven men calling themselves
the Coalition of Low-Ranking Police Officers headed to a satellite
TV studio to air their discontent. They were arrested before
the interview began. The next day, scores of police demonstrated
in front of the Security Directorate in the Sharqiyya province
to demand release of the seven.
Another
flashpoint is the tension between the police and medical doctors,
which has sharpened along with the greater incidence of police
brutality since the coup. In late January, two officers appeared
at Matariyya General Hospital, which is near one of the deadliest
police stations in the country. One policeman had minor cuts
but wanted a report with a doctor’s signature that exaggerated
his condition. The physician, Mu’min ‘Abd al-‘Azim,
said no. The unharmed officer punched ‘Abd al-‘Azim.
Another doctor intervened to help his colleague, and the cops
called for backup. Eight more officers showed up, and dragged
the two doctors outside for a further beating. The doctors tried
to press charges at the police station, and were threatened
with jail time if they insisted. On February 12, nearly 10,000
doctors gathered in front of their professional syndicate building.
The physicians issued a set of demands calling for accountability
for violent cops and fundamental reform in hospital security,
including a firearms ban and installation of video cameras.
The rallying cry was “the rule of law.”
Someone
connected to the weakened state wants to intimidate the Egyptians
who monitor and publicize abuses like those in Matariyya. In
mid-February, police showed up at the El-Nadeem Center, which
has provided psychological and other support to torture victims
since 1993, with a closure order. The Health Ministry claimed
that the Center had exceeded its mandate to treat victims and
entered the realm of advocacy with its well-researched reports.
At a subsequent press conference, Center director Aida Seif
al-Dawla was defiant: “We will be at the center every
day during work hours until they come and close it down. As
long as they keep torturing, the reports will continue to be
issued. The only way those reports will not be issued is if
they stop practicing torture.”
On
February 22, Hossam Bahgat, perhaps the country’s leading
investigative journalist, was barred from traveling to a UN
conference in Jordan on justice in the Arab world. Bahgat had
been summoned and detained by military intelligence in November,
because of an article he had published about the secret conviction
of 26 army officers on charges of conspiring to oust Sisi. But
he had been allowed to leave Egypt twice since that time, so
the ban came as a surprise. He joins a growing no-fly list that
includes human rights activist Gamal Eid.
The
crackdown extends to the arts. On February 20, a Cairo court
sentenced novelist Ahmad Naji to two years in prison for offending
“public morality” because his latest offering, Istikhdam
al-Hayat (The Use of Life), features scenes of sex and drug
use. The case was particularly egregious: Naji was acquitted
in a lower court and the draconian sentence was imposed after
the prosecutor appealed. The novelist’s jailing provoked
outrage from many corners in civil society, and even Sisi’s
culture minister, Hilmi al-Namnam, attended a solidarity press
conference.
Some
of these cases may be resolved as the criticism is dampened.
Yet only a fool would be unfazed by the frequency of the travesties
of justice. As one journalist said, rattling off the previous
week’s litany of bad news, “You don’t get
over one tragedy, and then another one happens.” His list
of incidents sounded like the week of Darbaka, Naji, Nadeem
and Bahgat, only with different names and details.
SPACES
OF ERASURE AND SURVEILLANCE
The
spirit of 2011 is no longer audible in chants resounding from
Tahrir Square or visible in graffiti covering the walls downtown.
For a time after the uprising, the torched headquarters of Mubarak’s
National Democratic Party was left standing—a reminder
of people power. It has now been demolished. On Qasr al-‘Ayni
Street, the main artery leading south from the iconic plaza,
a steel gate painted like an Egyptian flag opens and shuts to
regulate access. As one researcher told me, “That whole
area was closed because that is where the dissent used to gather.”
Whoever gives such sweeping orders has emptied downtown Cairo
of much of its leisure activity, as well. The coffee shops no
longer bustle on the pedestrian mall near the stock exchange,
and art galleries have been closed.
The area is crawling with police, both men in uniform and plainclothes
officers who blend in to the crowd. Closed-circuit video cameras
protrude from balcony after balcony. Blast walls encircle government
buildings such as the Foreign Ministry, the Central Bank, the
Court of Cassations and Parliament. The effect is that state
security agencies seem to be everywhere and nowhere at the same
time. Local journalists regard it as ‘crazy’ to
snap pictures downtown.
The
security presence might be even heavier in Garden City, southeast
of Tahrir Square along the Nile, which is home to the US, British,
Canadian and Italian embassies, among others. The Italian mission
was busy in February between the press attention to the murder
of researcher Giulio Regeni (almost certainly by secret police)
and the deal cut by Italian energy conglomerate Eni to develop
the “supergiant” natural gas field off Egypt’s
Mediterranean shore. Blast walls surround many embassies as
well.
Two
organizations the government dislikes—the Egyptian Initiative
for Personal Rights and the independent newspaper Mada Masr—are
also located in Garden City. Both are churning out hard-hitting
research and reporting, in both Arabic and English, and both
receive regular, thinly veiled threats from anonymous security
officers. “They call and say, ‘We know about your
personal life. We know you don’t mean to ruin the reputation
of the country.’ Stuff like that,” says one contact.
Mada Masr is moving into new offices elsewhere in an effort
to step away from the glare.
The
swanky island district of Zamalek feels less closely watched.
Egyptians mingle more freely with foreigners there, and speaking
a foreign language arouses less suspicion. The island has its
own unnerving sights, such as convoys of black Jeep Wranglers
bearing heavily armed paramilitaries in gray-and-black camouflage
and, sometimes, black masks. The jeeps are adorned with a decal
that reads the People’s Police (shurtat al-sha`b).”
But no one can remember when this new force appeared and few
seem overly concerned. As one journalist said, “I don’t
even notice them anymore. I think they are mostly performative.
They do a lot of driving around at night and pointing their
guns—only in upper-class neighbourhoods, though.”
Another reporter concurred, “It is plainclothes security
that comes to your house and arrests you at 4 am. They are the
ones that carry out the disappearances.”
AN
ISOLATED ECONOMIC EMPIRE
Besides
trepidation about the aggression of the security agencies, the
common refrain in Cairo is worry about the economy. The country’s
reserves of foreign currency are sloughing away. Purchasing
dollars is almost impossible, even at the airport, which angers
Egyptians still permitted to travel outside the country. The
official exchange rate is 7.6 Egyptian pounds to the dollar,
and the black market pays 9.5 to 1. Everyone expects another
devaluation of the pound, which will produce inflation and strain
the household budgets of the majority even further. A significant
devaluation would cause the pension system to collapse.
The
military, despite its vaunted economic empire, may not be able
to keep the wolf at its own door, let alone Egypt’s. After
Mubarak was overthrown, the army strove to enshrine its interests
in the constitution and various laws, for instance shielding
its budget from parliamentary oversight. But these moves did
not give the army access to even greater wealth. “They
now subsidize the treasury,” says one analyst, “not
the other way around.” In December 2011 the Defense Ministry
donated $1 billion to the Central Bank. Military, Inc. is also
said to be paying the subsidies on the population’s electricity
bills. Such actions send a message to foreign capital that the
economy is at risk. The analyst continues, “Sure, the
military gained influence, but they are paying for a civil bureaucracy
that cannot be counted on politically. They cannot reform the
bureaucracy, so they pay them, while also spending money for
development and investment opportunities. It’s lose-lose.
It’s a Greek tragedy that is not sustainable.”
The
dilemma is not a new one for Egypt’s rulers. Around the
time of the 2011 uprising, political economist Samer Soliman
published a study of the deterioration of the Egyptian state’s
fiscal health over the course of Mubarak’s 30-year presidency.
As rents like foreign aid and Suez Canal transit fees shrank
as a percentage of the economy, the state had less revenue to
work with. The state reduced social expenditures to prevent
foreign debt from spiraling upward. Yet, alongside the cuts,
the civil service burgeoned to more than 5 million employees,
and no one dared to touch the most important subsidies on gas
and electricity. This tepid neoliberalism made the state a liar
in two senses of the word: It was not cutting fast enough to
please the international financial institutions, but it was
cutting more than enough to spark popular discontent. It was
neither a command economy nor neoliberalism that led Egypt to
erupt in protest in the late Mubarak years. It was the state’s
schizophrenic attempt to maintain both systems at once.
Quality
of life and purchasing power eroded throughout Mubarak’s
tenure. Hundreds of thousands of families suffered tremendous
hardship, particularly those dependent on wages in stagnant
state sectors like the civil service and industry, as well as
those running small businesses. The population started to rebel.
The state had no systemic response but to double down on repression.
Yet the more money Mubarak funneled into the Interior Ministry,
the less was available for affordable housing, hospitals, schools,
universities, public transportation and recreational space,
all of which crucial infrastructure slipped into unusable condition.
Households stretched their fixed incomes to accommodate rising
food costs, private tutors and clinic visits. Savings vanished,
and millions were thrown into the informal economy to earn a
little extra cash. Luxury housing developments served a tiny
fraction of the population while everyone else worked two or
more jobs just to get by.
Military,
Inc. was relatively protected from both the economic malaise
and the public anger about it. Everyone knew the military had
its perks but they were mostly hidden from view. Then the coup
thrust Sisi and the generals into the spotlight. It is lonely
at the top: Sisi has no party patronage machine like Mubarak
did. But he does have to contend with the same assertive public
sector, which is now larger than any time since 1952. By the
calculations of the Central Agency for Regulation and Administration,
the state employed 5.6 million workers in 2010. According to
media reports, another 900,000 employees have been added to
the rolls since the uprising.
One
of Sisi’s first gambits was to issue a presidential decree
(there was no parliament when he took office) altering the civil
service payment system. Previously, 80 percent of pay was made
up of bonuses awarded by seniority and the rest was fixed salary.
The edict switched the percentages, tied bonuses to performance
and capped their size. The civil service unions objected that
the changes amounted to pay cuts. In January, a new parliament
was seated and charged with passing all of Sisi’s 342
decrees into permanent law. The assembly was widely expected
to have a wet noodle for a spine, and indeed approved most of
the executive orders, but MPs struck down the civil service
decree by a count of 332 to 150, with seven abstentions. According
to the Finance Ministry, the public-sector wage bill rose by
8.4 percent from July to December 2015, even with the decree
in effect.
Sisi
thus confronts the same Catch-22 as Mubarak did. As one academic
put it, “The reproduction of the post-independence state
is the trap. If you do nothing and let it continue, the fiscal
crisis undermines the state. If you liberalize the economy,
you undermine the state. Instead, it’s a bloated civil
service, new and more police, and piecemeal cuts that produce
protests.” Indeed, in the first week of March a wave of
strikes, mostly by public-sector workers upset about stagnant
wages, rolled across the country.
Meanwhile,
there is friction between the military and big business, almost
the only Egyptians to prosper under Mubarak. After the uprising,
Military, Inc. might have expected to profit from the exile
of select Mubarak cronies and the prosecution of others. Yet
when the army took over the state, problems started.
There
is evidence that Military, Inc. is pursuing two contradictory
policies. First, as political economist Abdel-Fattah Barayez
has shown, the armed forces are reaching out to civilian big
business to pursue the grand national prestige projects over
which Sisi presides. To help excavate the New Suez Canal, for
example, they contracted with more than 70 private companies,
including Orascom, owned by the super-rich Sawiris family. Given
that Sisi gave the New Suez Canal to Military, Inc., these contracts
are effectively subsidies to private capital that diminish the
army’s own profits. In other cases, the military subsidized
the civilian state. In 2014, to build 1 million housing units,
the military was to provide the Emirati corporation Arabtec
with land at no cost in exchange for that company’s agreement
to hire Egyptian labour and buy Egyptian materials. Arabtec
apparently balked, so the military turned the project over to
the Housing Ministry, which brought the Emirati company back
on board. A similar sequence of events occurred with a military
deal with General Electric to build 12 turbines to generate
power. The military paid GE an enormous advance, some 25 percent
of the contract’s value, and then gave project management
to the Electricity Ministry. The generals, Barayez argues, are
putting political goals ahead of economic ones. “The military
is gradually abandoning its long-standing role as a partner
to the ruling establishment,” he writes. “Instead,
it is becoming an active participant in the construction of
a new authoritarian order.” These moves are also attempts
to build an alliance with Egypt’s private business class.
At
the same time, however, Military, Inc. is trying to expand its
commercial ties at the expense of big business. Before the 2011
uprising, the armed forces sold plots of land to Egyptian tycoons
at below market rates. The businessmen then partnered with foreign
investors to build high-end housing and tourist villages. Foreign
capital came into Egypt through big business. Now the military
is overseeing groups like the National Service Project Organization
and the Armed Forces Land Project Authority to cultivate foreign
capital directly.
This
development is stoking animosity between the military and business
elites but also fusing state power and wealth. As one analyst
argued, “This is reconfiguring all the crony networks.
The same people that allocate the land are now directly profiting.
They become more powerful, are armed and have resources.”
The tensions surfaced the November 2015 freezing of press mogul
Salah Diab’s assets on charges of appropriating state
land. They are also visible in the anaemic performance of the
Long Live Egypt fund, a presidentially supervised charity that
Sisi hoped would attract billions of pounds in citizen donations.
Despite the thicket of billboards that advertise upscale residences
across the capital, it is not business as usual. The military’s
economic empire is powerful but, ironically, it is more isolated
now that it is more fully integrated into the state.
SISI
THE MAGICIAN?
In
private, or out of earshot of the lone informer sitting in the
corner, nearly every Egyptian observer says that neither the
political system nor the economy is working. No one uses the
word “stability,” unlike under Mubarak, when many
gave it lip service though most thought it was an illusion.
No one defends Sisi or his policies, though charitable sorts
might say, “It’s not him. It’s his people”—the
Interior Ministry, army, parliamentarians, judges and media
personalities. If Sisi had a honeymoon with Egyptians, it is
clearly over.
It
is one thing to dictate outcomes behind the scenes and another
thing to govern, in the open, with constituencies that one has
to appease. In just five short years, the military’s private
economic empire has transformed into a new domestic subsidizer
of the state. Pencil-pushing bureaucrats, sweaty labourers and
fed-up consumers, as well as rehabilitated crony capitalists
of the Mubarak era, are bringing Military, Inc. and its public
faces to heel.
While
the dust settles in this multi-sided melee, the only certainty
is more protest, whereby ordinary Egyptians try to preserve
their bare-bones prerogatives in a capricious system that will
arrest and torture anyone who does not have several layers of
protection. If Sisi survives to fashion a regime as falsely
stable as what reigned in the bad old days of Mubarak, he will
be a magician. At present, he resembles a quasi-comical warm-up
act, albeit one with an army, while everyone awaits the next
chapter of Egypt’s tumultuous story.
